05/25/2016

Clinton’s Email Practices Sharply Criticized

by ZixCorp

We’ve been reading today that the State Department’s independent watchdog has severely criticized former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for using a private email server during the course of her public business. In an obvious rebuke, the State Department Inspector General’s report says that Ms. Clinton’s use of her private server was a violation of State Department policies and practices.

According to CNN, the report says a then director of the Office of Information Resources Management “stated that the Secretary's personal system had been reviewed and approved by Department legal staff and that the matter was not to be discussed any further." The same director reportedly "instructed the staff never to speak of the Secretary's personal email system again.” Nevertheless the report goes on to state that interviews with several officials found "no knowledge of approval or review by other Department staff."

While we at Zix will not be commenting on any potential political ramifications, it is particularly noteworthy that a great many intelligent, well-educated and powerful senior executives - and staff - have clearly not understood how vulnerable emails can be when not protected effectively. During the period up until February 2013, and quite possibly beyond then, there has been a misunderstanding by supposedly well informed people of the security risks inherent to emails. Clearly they believed that securing emails effectively was not only time-consuming, but also a complex or cumbersome activity. How sad it is that they did not, and may still not know, that modern email encryption can be both secure and simple to use.

The Zix Encryption Network has 13,500 member organizations with over three million individual users, all of whom can exchange emails transparently. That is, they type an email and press the send button; while the recipient reads the email presented to them in clear-text, already decrypted. The sending and receiving of secure emails is so fast and easy that Zix has to place a blue banner in every secured email just to confirm to users that the email was actually encrypted while in transit.

Anyone wishing to read more about the industry’s leading email encryption solution should click here.